Modern communication networks have evolved to handle various kinds of data. For example, a telecommunication network in the past was primarily designed for handling voice communication. In this way, a major use of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) was to convey voice signals over a switched connection from one terminal to another. Since the network provided a dedicated connection between terminals the quality of experience (QoE) to the users was generally good.
With the advent of packet switched communication networks, additional consideration had to be made when “real-time” data was communicated. Such “real-time” data include for example data packets involved in telephony over the internet protocol (IP, IP-telephony). Since the users' voices are encoded into digital data and this data being communicated in packets, it cannot be taken for granted that the packets arrive at the destination in time or in the right order. If—for example—packets are delayed, also the voice output is delayed, which in turn affects the quality of experience to a user. It is to be noted, however, that delay is certainly not the only factor affecting QoE, and relevant factors also include disruption of data, loss of data, etc.
The considerations may become more complex in conjunction of more “data-intense” communication, such as video telephony, multimedia streaming, web-based television and the like. Further, also the communication of measurement data, control data, etc. involved in the functional aspects of networks and applications run over networks may be sensitive to QoE, since for example—an application may severely suffer if required control data arrives too late.
As regards existing communication networks, the case of modern telecommunication networks of 3GPP-, LTE- or a further generation type are certainly of interest. These networks are capable of communicating large amounts of data so that also applications such as video-telephony and multimedia streaming became possible even to wireless, mobile devices (mobile telephones, smart phones, tablet and other portable personal computers, and the like).
However, existing solutions do not consider the QoE when managing and/or controlling communication toward a user terminal. Moreover, there is no current mechanism in 3GPP type implementations that monitors and ensures a certain end user QoE. Therefore, there is a need for improvement in order to allow for an enhanced QoE at the side of the user terminals.